Review: Coca: The Dove from Chechnya

When you think of Chechnya, what comes to mind? The long-standing civil war between Chechen separatists and the Russian government? Armed terrorists storming a parliamentary meeting? The 2004 assassination of Chechen president Akhmad Kadyrov, killed when a landmine was detonated underneath his VIP platform during a World War Two memorial parade? Chechen terrorists, often women, committing suicide bombings? Chechen rebels taking a school full of children hostage in Beslan? The actions of the rebels, under the stewardship of Shamil Basayev, make it difficult for many people to view the Chechen conflict with much sympathy for the Chechen side.

Coca: the Dove from Chechnya, being shown as a part of the traveling Amnesty International Film Festival, aims to show the world a different side of the bloody and violent conflict, through the lens of another kind of weapon - the video cameras of a group of Chechen women. The film highlights footage collected since 1994 by Chechen activist Zainap Gashaeva, (nicknamed Coca, which means "dove") founder of a group called Echoes of War, a group of Chechen women documenting the atrocities the Russian government has committed against the Chechen people in their war on terror. Gashaeva is well-known in the international community for her tireless campaign to draw attention to the suffering of the Chechen people at the hands of the Russian government.

This is not a slick, well-produced Hollywood film. Much of the footage is grainy, shaky, and difficult to watch. That's because the footage wasn't taken on a Hollywood back lot or on location in Canada; it was shot, often under dangerous circumstances, by Gashaeva and other women - much of it during and in the aftermath of bloody conflicts with Russian soldiers. The footage is raw, and often excruciatingly painful to watch, yet impossible to tear your eyes from.

This is real life in Chechnya as seen through the eyes of the women living there: a 19 year old boy, his abdomen blown away by gunfire, gasping his dying breaths as he lies on the street; women, children and old men, living in a makeshift refugee camp that provides barely adequate shelter; a small boy, badly burned when Russian bombs were dropped on his village, his abdomen and legs a mass of ugly scars that, because of inadequate medical treatment, did not heal properly and hurt him daily as his growing body stretches the scar tissue; bodies laid out on the street - men, women, even small children; Russian soldiers in a Ministry of Justice truck, shooting Chechen men and laughingly joking that "the more dead bodies we have, the easier our job is"; a mass grave filled with decomposing bodies. These are the images Gashaeva and other women of Chechnya risk their lives to take, as they painstakingly document the violence of the Chechen conflict and its impact on the lives of the real people struggling to survive there.

The videos, hundreds of them, are hidden by the women, buried under floorboards, stashed in the backs of closets and in hollowed out walls, and smuggled out of the country by Gashaeva and others in nondescript shopping bags as often as they can get them out. In addition to the mountains of dusty tapes, Gashaeva and her partners have built a database of information linking and cross-linking facts about Chechens who have disappeared at the hands of the state police - a painstaking record they hope will someday be used as a reckoning, and perhaps a link to find out what happened to the missing.

There is some interesting footage, also, of Gashaeva attending human rights meetings, politely but firmly telling her point of view on what is happening in Chechnya to a bunch of mostly male European politicians who politely nod but seem not to particularly be affected by her story. The one person who does seem to care what's going on in Chechnya is Walter Kälin, the United Nations appointee designated to look into human rights abuses in Chechnya; it took him a year after his appointment before the Russian government would even grant him permission to travel to Chechnya to pursue his investigation.

Another interesting bit in the film is a confrontation between Gashaeva and the controversial Kadyrov, shot a few months before his assassination. The director asks Kadyrov if it's true that he once encouraged every Chechen to kill 150 Russians. No, not 150, Kadryov replies. He goes on to explain that what he said was that every Chechen should kill as many Russians as possible - that he never said they should stop at 150.

Things like this, and the hostage-taking in Beslan that resulted in the deaths of over 300 people, make sympathy for Chechnya a tough sell. Much of what the West has seen about the conflict is shown from the position that the Chechens are terrorists and the Russian government is just trying to control them. What director Eric Bergkraut attempts to do in Coca is show the world there's more to this story than what we see on CNN - that the Chechen conflict is not a story about a government's effort to control terrorists, but rather about the genocide of a people by a government. Some estimates are that as much as 30% of the Chechen population has been killed; numbers vary, but somewhere between 10,000 and 35,000 of those killed have been children. What Bergkraut and his main protagonist, Gashaeva, want the world to see is the average Chechen being affected by the bloody conflict, not the few Chechens who have resorted to terrorism. Gashaeva herself does not support the terrorists, and refuses to videotape them.

Coca is not a slick political documentary, although Bergkraut is very vocal about Western Europe closing its eyes to the Chechen conflict, and in particular of the heads of Western European governments courting Russian president Putin and not listening to the Chechen side of the story. The violence could likely be ended on both sides by the Russian government agreeing to grant Chechnya independence within its borders, and the international community supporting an independent Chechen government, but as in all things political, solutions are never as simple and one-sided as they might seem to the layperson looking in from the outside. Bergkraut doesn't attempt in this film to delve into the political labyrinth at the heart of the Chechen conflict; he acknowledges, as do Gashaeva and the other women in the film, that there has been fault and violence on both sides of this tragic coin, and that there are no easy answers.

This film, then, is not so much a political film, as a human one. It is the story of Gashaeva, and the other women profiled in the film: Lipkhan Basaiewa, a former professor who is now a human rights activist with Russian organization Memorial, Tamara Rovkova, an independent Chechen human rights activist, and Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist and author who was poisoned when she tried to mediate the Beslan hostage crisis - and their bravery in raising their voices about the human rights issues in Chechnya, even as people around them are murdered or disappear for merely bringing their cases before the European Human Rights Court. Their families, mostly, would like them to be less vocal, to blend in more, to not risk their lives, and yet they still fight on to get their side of the story out. Their bravery, more than anything, makes Coca a film worth watching, in spite of its cinematic flaws.